Pitchfork

Several days after the close of Sónar, and I can't get a Pixies song out of my head. Specifically, "Where Is My Mind?" I think it may be lying somewhere on the floor of the DJ booth at Barcelona's Moog club, but we'll get to that later. For this column I'd intended to write an all-encompassing review of both MUTEK and Sónar, but after eight days of shows at both fests (separated by an all-too brief respite and one long-ass Heathrow layover) and five cumulative days of assorted afterparties, the idea of presenting a totalizing perspective seems not only impossible, but absurd.

Montreal's seven-year-old MUTEK sticks to a single-venue model, with only one performance happening at any given time, but at Sónar multiple stages, parallel attractions (multimedia screenings, a record fair, listening stations), and the general bustle of a 20,000-strong crowd compete for the attendee's attention. In recent years, Sónar has seen a proliferation of unofficial "off" events, ranging from unaffiliated club nights to beach parties to the crusty-flavored "anti-Sónar," located in the park adjacent to Sónar's hangar-like nighttime venue.

The Barcelona festival's daytime lineups this year were, let's face it, a bit slack, and strangely programmed-- the Knife was Thursday's biggest offering by far, but they were slotted in a limited-capacity hall that left many fans of the Swedish duo either squeezed into a hopeless queue or squinting into a sun-drenched simulcast of the concert that left most details of the shadowy set to the imagination. Friday and Saturday nights had stronger offerings, but any Sónar veteran knows that once you've made it to the nighttime venue, located a few miles from the city center and inadequately serviced by taxis, there's no getting home until morning. With a weekend packed with club events from Kompakt, Bpitch Control, Playhouse, Kill the DJ, Poker Flat, Minus, Escorteaze booking, Mobilee, Ed Banger, Get Physical, DFA, Freude Am Tanzen, Moon Harbour, Output, Gigolo, and practically every other electronic label on the planet, I opted to stay close to home and keep my club-hopping options open. (This calendar gives you a pretty good idea of the glut of options available.) So in lieu of a total recall, here's a short list of my personal highlights from the two events.

Modeselektor @ MUTEK
At Sónar, I missed Modeselektor's main-stage performance in front of around 10,000 people, which is a shame, because it would make for a startling contrast to their MUTEK gig, where they rocked a crowd of mere hundreds. Modeselektor's mix of dancehall, hip-hop, and rave doesn't lend itself to what you'd call an "intimate" setting, but it was a thrill to be up close and personal with the duo, who cap their performance with just the right bit of clownishness. By the end, having run out of material, Gernot was simply playing back mp3s-- of other artists-- but we all kept dancing regardless.

Jan Jelinek and Deadbeat, ~scape showcase @ MUTEK
MUTEK's new venue, the post-industrial Darling Foundry, didn't do any favors to artists like Dimbiman or Steve Beauprea, whose detail-intensive compositions were reflected to hell and back by cement and swallowed up by empty space. But the cavernous hall turned out to be just the thing for Jan Jelinek's cosmic freakout. Performing under hazy light reminiscent of Olafur Eliasson's light installation at Tate Modern, Jelinek teased greasy frequencies from his laptop; they seemed to hang in the air, expanding as though absorbing their own spent energy like some kind of psychedelic Hulk. It was, in a word, mindblowing. (Someone needs to program this guy alongside Sunn 0))).) Closing out the night, Deadbeat jackhammered our feet free from their dumbstruck roots with a live set that makes his recordings seem like mere sketches. The dub underpinning was there, as ever, but beefed up with heavier rhythms ranging from metallic techno clatter to reggaeton lurch; at times it sounded like a much more maximalist version of Ilpo Väisánen's dancehall-tinged 10"s on Kangaroo. "Climactic" doesn't begin to describe the way the set crested, faking a denouement before repeadtedly exploding. At the end of the performance, Deadbeat stood with a ridiculous grin on his face and his arms raised high overhead in a victory gesture. He deserved both.

Ricardo Villalobos and Richie Hawtin, Piknik Electronik @ MUTEK
Ricardo Villalobos is famous for many things: His productions, his talent on the decks, his drug-taking. Recently, he's also become famous (or infamous, as it were) for not showing up for gigs-- he's been a no-show at three MUTEK-related events in recent years, including a headlining shot at last year's festival. Ever faithful, MUTEK gave him another shot. (Although, being cautious, initially programmed him only as "Surprise Guest.") The great surprise was not only that he showed up (paying for his own flight, at that) but that he and Hawtin were at their very best, straying neither toward Hawtin's tendency for taka-taka loopism nor Villalobos' occasional tribalism. Perhaps inspired by the break in the clouds-- rain forced the previous day's Piknik programming to move inside-- they kept it light and almost frisky while thousands danced beneath an Alexander Calder stabile facing the Montreal skyline. Special bonus: Magda demonstrating the "Ministry of Minimal Walks" on video. (Don't expect to see that one on YouTube any time soon, barring the walker's unlikely permission!)

Chic Miniature @ MUTEK campout
Once the festival had ended, 50 or so members of MUTEK's crew, accompanied by a few artists and journos who were still in town, headed to the Quebec countryside for two days at a lakeside lodge. The party ran all night, both nights, with DJs tag-teaming underneath a shelter while the rain drowned a short-lived bonfire. The highlight was a very late set from Chic Miniature, the duo of Egg's Guillaume Coutu-Dumont and Argentina's Ernesto Ferreyra, who ran through 90 minutes of bleepy, percussive and, yeah, minimal material, including tracks from their Raum...musik release as well as a slew of new tracks, all awash in bell tones, chimes and wriggly syncopations. The set was as tight as the rest of us were messy, even when the pair proceeded to spend the next hour and a half improvising a blend of their respective solo tracks.

Mobilee showcase @ Raum, Barcelona
Mobilee founder Anja Schneider was the headliner at her label showcase, playing alongside Mobilee artists Pan-Pot, Sebo K, GummiHz, Exercise One and Ralf Kolmann, and guests Argy and Patrick Chardronnet; her set was a solid recap of Mobilee's hyperkinetic, low-end-heavy approach to raving, presented in a quick'n'dirty mixing style that occasionally seemed ready to veer out of control, but always locked into place before any actual shoes-in-the-dryer calamities occurred. But it was Exercise One that really rocked it, with a dual laptop set that snapped, crackled and popped in all the right places-- when it wasn't bobbing, bumping and jumping. Is it just me, or are more and more artists really stepping up their live acts?

c/o pop beach party, Barcelona
One of Barcelona's best features is its chiringuitos-- the beach cafes serving marginally overpriced drinks and generally blasting reprehensible Ibiza house, but with a Mediterranean atmosphere so sublime you'll forgive them the missteps. Kompakt has traditionally held an afternoon chiringuito party on the Sunday after Sónar, along with a few other labels; this year it seemed like everyone was getting into the act-- in a single stretch of beach only a few hundred meters long, you could hit showcases from Get Physical, Minus, and Kompakt (the latter hosted by Cologne's c/o pop festival).

After a weekend's worth of clubbing, though, wandering was out of the question, so once we arrived at the c/o pop event, we didn't budge, aside from dips in the ocean and trips to the bar. Despite rumors that Wolfgang Voigt would be playing, he never did take to the decks, but you couldn't very well complain, with Michael Mayer, Koze, and Tobias Thomas carrying the party in expert fashion for a good eight or nine hours. Kompakt's darker side-- their Speicher brutalism-- buried its head in the sand, leaving a wide-open space for the DJs to show their sunnier dispositions, full of starry-eyed disco and Postal Service remixes.

The official Kompakt party at Nitsa a few nights before was good-- Gui Boratto in particular-- but the beach party confirmed my suspicion that electronic music (save, say, dubstep) is almost always better experienced outdoors, bathed in light and air. Mayer's closing track may or may not have been a sort of inside joke: At the Kompakt beach party two years ago, Mayer had played Andre Kraml's "Safari", then on promo, practically every hour, on the hour, those damned elephants ringing out like some kind of surreal riff on Cologne's famous church bells (or something). Sure enough, the final selection this time around was the same track all over again. The birth of a tradition?